Please don’t be afraid of Captain Kirk! There are many stories about William Shatner, the main actor in the Star Trek series, he sings and performs incredible action scenes and, every now and then, or so it seems, a new toupee.
But Shatner as a template for a murderer? That’s what the legend says. The mask of Michael Myers, probably the most popular serial killer in film history, is said to come from a facial cast of Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
But that’s all the funny things about Michael Myers and “Halloween” have been said. The film, shot in 1977 by the then 29-year-old John Carpenter, seemed like pure terror to viewers. It’s best to read the sentences of the psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), who has known the masked murderer Myers since his childhood, melts in the mouth, in the original:
“I met him, fifteen years ago; I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience, no understanding; and even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes… the devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… evil.”
The fact that a doctor of all people no longer believes in therapy but in the supernatural is of course the point. A year later, Carpenter re-shot a few scenes for the TV version. One of them is one of his strongest ever. The psychiatrist visits the boy in his ward room. There had previously been an argument with the other doctors about early discharge.
“You fooled them all. But not me,” says Loomis. This is followed by a slow zoom on the boy’s face. Little Michael still doesn’t talk. He sits in his chair and stares motionless out the window. Wait for his action outside, no matter when it comes.
Michael punishes loving teenagers
The doctor uses it to describe a boy who he considers to be the embodiment of evil. The child murdered his older sister and her boyfriend before being admitted to the psychiatric hospital. He caught them both having sex.
A six-year-old with the eyes of the devil. Carpenter’s “Halloween” was revolutionary, both in terms of content and form. Because the character of Michael Myers could not only be interpreted as a devil born, but also as morally disturbed. Myers was a caricature of the fundamentalist: He wanted to kill teenagers whose sexuality was just awakening – even teenage girls who had no idea about sex, like Michael Myers’ cousin Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis).
Because, one thing is certain, married couples don’t have to believe in “Halloween.” The black man followed her to every last corner. His break into the walk-in closet where Laurie is hiding is perhaps the most disturbing sequence. A break-in into an intimate area that paid homage to Hitchcock’s shower scene from Psycho.
For the young protagonists in the film, all was well with the world. They smoked weed and fucked. That was the free spirit of the seventies. Evil had absolutely nothing to do with bad upbringing – pure evil came out of nowhere, suddenly there was the extremist Myers. “Halloween” established the trick of the unkillable, faceless, he-gets-up-again murderer who suddenly disappears or can be seen again in an unfamiliar corner.
And of course the girls are attacked just when they seem to be safe exactly in that one spot in the dark where then…well. The young women’s cries for help are all the more effective. Jamie Lee Curtis coined the genre term “Scream Queen” with her performance.
“Halloween” may have been the birth of a number of cinema know-it-alls who know exactly what you definitely shouldn’t do in dangerous situations. Sexualized teenagers who are hunted and killed: This story still exists today, entire film series, from “Friday the 13th” to “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, but also parodies like “Scream” are shot according to the same pattern (and these days end up straight in the B-movie section of the increasingly rarely visited local video store).
The facelessness of the murderer – after all, the adult Myers always wears a mask except for his final appearance – is not just intended to frighten the viewer. Lurking behind the mask we. The viewer therefore also sees Myer’s first murder from the perpetrator’s perspective. Director Steven Spielberg also used the camera from the first person point of view four years earlier for his “Jaws”. It was just easier to distance yourself because it was about an animal.
When it came to “Halloween” and its look at the perpetrator, you were torn: What should have happened to you to become such a killer?